School’s Out! #15 with Pascale Sablan

On the 26th of February, Pascale Sablan was our guest at School’s Out! #15. Pascale is an architect, educator, curator and activist based in New York City. She is part of an avant-garde of young, black women who are changing the architectural landscape of America, but whose ambitions do not end at its borders. With her organisation ‘Beyond the built environment’, Pascale is fighting for an equitable and reflectively built environment, through architecture. One of her spectacular successes is the travelling exhibition ‘Say It Loud!’ That confronts the communities where it lands with their racially diverse histories but also with the often poor way in which these are reflected in the architectural community or the built environment. In more than a dozen localities – including the United Nations Headquarters – ‘Say it Loud’ has shaped the conversation and has desegregated the architecture debate. Recently, Pascal became the New York Associate of David Adjaye Associates and will add her unique insight and energy to this world-wide design firm, no doubt revolutionizing its portfolio.

Pascale talked to us from New York about how communities make their diversity a central part of shaping the built environment. In a Superdiverse City like Rotterdam, where most design decisions are still made from a bastion of elite whiteness, such a conversation was much needed!

About Pascale Sablan
Pascale Sablan, AIA, NOMA, LEED AP, With over eleven years of experience, she has been on the team for a variety of mixed-use, commercial, cultural & residential projects in the U.S., Saudi Arabia, India, Azerbaijan, & UAE. Currently a Senior Associate at S9ARCHITECTURE in New York. Pascale is the 315th living African-American female registered architect in the United States. She is the Founder & Executive Director of Beyond the Built Environment, positioned to uniquely address the inequitable disparities in architecture by providing a holistic platform aimed to support numerous stages of the architecture pipeline. She has been awarded with the 2018 Pratt Alumni Achievement Award, the NOMA Prize for Excellence in Design and Building Design + Construction 40 Under 40; featured on the Cover of the September 2017 issue. Pascale is 2018 AIA Young Architects Award Recipient and was featured in the Council of Tall Building & Urban Habitat Research Paper, in the same company as Zaha Hadid. Mrs. Sablan holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Pratt Institute and a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from the Columbia University. Pascale has given lectures at Colleges and Universities all over the US; cultural institutions such as the United Nations and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American Heritage and Culture.